Well actually… Thomas Sowell (who is black) talks about how he felt safe going around on his own in Harlem in the 40s and 50s, and never heard a gunshot. So there actually was a fair amount of social trust / actual safety in black communities even then. With the obvious caveat of course that interracial violence was still a risk. But at least within black communities then, yes there was more social trust.
I would argue the best way to do things that will surpass your life is to have kids, love them and teach and train them in what is good and true and right and with all of the knowledge and wisdom you have, and then see them surpass you.
I think you need to be in a significiantly good place to wait for your children to surpass you. In a place to have the right to delegate your responsibility to do something that surpasses your life.
How do you do that? I tried to get Kaiser to tell me how much my wife's delivery would be and what they told us was much less than the actual bill, even though there weren't any complications
I have not made any effort to get them to do that. Most of my experience with them has been really routine stuff -- "visit copay", "get a blood sample taken", or the like -- but this also happened for a stomach biopsy involving cramming a huge device down my throat, and for which they wanted to have me sedated, which seems like a pretty close analogy to a childbirth with no complications. :/
Reading through this list reminded me why I actually don’t want to use TS in the first place.
I think we need to have a discussion about the benefits of dynamically typed languages and why many people purposely choose them over statically typed ones.
In my experience, 95% of the time TS would not have helped anything. And the other 5% where it would have is not worth the constant work required to type the whole application. And sure you can use ts just a little bit... but everyone knows that organizationally the pressure then begins to use TS for the whole app.
Types are nice in some circumstances but are they really worth it? I feel like the answer is no for the majority of applications.
When enforced like a code coverage score I agree. If in your day-to-day there's static checking against any/unknown, well, that's effectively saying 'only type-checked code welcome'.
Which is kind of sad and against the origins of TS, which meant to supplement JS without bringing all that uncool into the school.
Sometimes I dig into source of a supposedly JS library and witness the author not just the type-checking, but OOPy interfaces, private/public, and I again feel the itch that this superset is a more refined embrace, extend, and extinguish.
I totally agree. I thought typescript might grow on me as I got to grips with it, but alas a year of using it and it's still slowing me down a lot for how much it's helping.
Also "don't use 'any'" - there are a lot of edge cases where this can be very difficult to avoid. Even the TS experts have failed to help me figure out how to remove some "any"s. I'm sure there is a correct way, but it just shouldn't be that difficult.
I'm kind of resigned to it. There's places where I imagine I'll end up using it and others where I'll do without.
Someone who talks intelligently about the strengths of dynamic languages is Rich Hickey. His talks challenge some of the ideas where static typing is superior to dynamic typing. He is arguably biased in his position but it makes for a refreshing contrast to the static types argument.
Clojure is a great example of the qualities required to make dynamic typing really powerful, the main one being the large library of functions that can operate over all collections. This reduces the amount of custom code you write for data munging, reducing surface area for bugs.
The complete counterpoint to that is Go with no utilities for doing common data transformations, forcing users to re-implement similar logic repeatedly. It may as well be statically typed at that stage to avoid mistakes from writing the same code over and over.
The more powerful statically typed languages with generics then fall somewhere in the middle where you don't have to repeat yourself as much.
I disagree. I really don't find Typescript hard to use at all, and I've preferred the security and well defined variables and functions that Typescript provides. I would use TS over JS any day.
100% with you on the idea of increasing the supply of doctors and shortening medical education.
My dad is an ophthalmologist and he does basically 3 surgeries that take up most of his work time: LASIK, cataract surgery, and cornea transplants.
Was it really necessary for him to do 13 years of schooling to learn how to do those 3 surgeries? I really don’t think so. I feel like we could train doctors in about 6 years (2 years of focused medical training + 4 years of residency / apprenticeship with a practicing doctor). If we’re honest about what doctors are learning, they would have about the same amount of time learning about their actual specialty compared to now, without so many hoops to jump through.
The current system is a cartel that must be reformed.
We also should consider international competition. There are competent doctors in India who could do expensive surgeries like hip replacements for 1/10 the cost AND get better results than the average hospital in the US.
At least we could sell health insurance across state lines...
It's mostly the food. It's not like people in other countries get that much more exercise than we do. (Source: lived in Ecuador for two years).
I watched this youtube video recently about recipes for cutting (weightlifting term for a diet that makes you lose weight) and eating some of the food has helped me lose some weight.
One reason for this is the artificially limited supply of doctors. The AMA combined with the government keeps the number of doctors down by keeping the number of medical schools and medical residencies low, driving up prices.
Deleted FB, Insta and Snap a little over four years ago... It was revealing how many friends I actually had compared to how many I thought I had. Surprising as well how much I don't miss it.
Deleted FB long ago enough now that I can't remember when exactly it was, but what I do remember is exactly zero of the people who I talked to primarily on Facebook contacted me any other way despite asking for contact details.
Not only do I not miss it, I'm actively hostile towards Facebook for the damage it does to the idea of friendship.
Social networks love to throw around the term "friend" as though all the kinds of relationships it denotes are the same. Clearly, it isn't.
There are people I know from mailing lists and newsgroups and fora who are my acquaintances, even though we've never met in meatspace. I have cried over their deaths and been happy at news of their joys.
There are people I remember from tens of years and thousands of miles away, whom I hear from more regularly because of social media networks. That's nice. It's low effort for me, it's low effort for them, and we all get more out of it than we put in.
If what you mean by the word "friend" is, someone who will answer your call in the middle of the night and bring over a shovel and a tarp -- I have only a few of those. Those relationships take more work, and are not fully sustained by social media, though they may be partially supported by it.
Your mention of mailing lists/fora/newsgroups made me wonder about how easy it is for people today to forge those same (non-"friends", but still) close relationships with strangers today. I definitely remember those close bonds with other internet users in the 1990s and early millennium.
However, today due to everyone moving to Facebook and other content silos with a mobile app, independent website forums are severely hollowing out. On some of the forums about various hobbies that I follow, the most active posters left are often extremely curmudgeonly elderly people, and if they hail from very polarized countries they are quick to descend into political rants to the point that they do little on-topic posting. Facebook isn’t a satisfying place for friendship due to the feeds and algorithms, and independent forums can now be high-stress environments. Consequently, the internet feels like a more lonely place than before.
People being people, they can use any medium they can find to make acquaintances.
Tools being tools, some of them are better than others.
Here's a list of subjects that I know people have bonded over:
- fandom of specific works
- generic fandom
- fish aquaria
- genre literature
- a period of history
- games (video, board, role-playing, LARP...)
- sports
- watches
- cars
- appliance repair
- carpentry
You need strict enough moderation that firefights and trolls are quashed immediately, and loose enough moderation that the occasional side-conversation or on-topic rant is allowed through. Proper threading and the ability to know what you've already seen and what is new: those are also necessary.
I feel that your optimism is unfounded. The specific kinds of fora you say are necessary, are a dying breed. They simply aren't as available to an internet user as before the rise of walled silos. Even where a forum is available or a user has the technical skills to put up his own forum, that forum is nothing without people other than yourself congregating there, and they have mainly left forever for the walled gardens.
The temperatures today might be, the difference is however that the Crusaders didn't burn fossil fuels at even remotely the same level as recent generations. CO2 concentration assures that the comfortable temperatures today aren't those enjoyed by future generations.
